Giant Bank JP Morgan Bans ChatGPT Use Among Employees

If the employees want to chat, they'll just have to talk to each other instead.

Compliance Concerns

JP Morgan is cracking down on the use of OpenAI's ChatGPT in the workplace, Bloomberg reports — though apparently not in response to a particular incident, and it remains unknown how many employees might have been fooling around the AI-powered chatbot while on the clock.

Instead, the restriction, which applies to the bank's global staff, was enacted to limit third-party software "due to compliance concerns," according to CNN's reporting.

And JP Morgan isn't the only bank with a stance on ChatGPT. Prominent investment bank Morgan Stanley has also mulled over its capabilities and shortcomings.

"When we talk of high-accuracy task, it is worth mentioning that ChatGPT sometimes hallucinates and can generate answers that are seemingly convincing, but are actually wrong," Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note on Wednesday, as quoted by Insider.

However, unlike JP Morgan, the Stanley Morgan analysts may see some potential for the use of ChatGPT and other generative AI in a workplace — with some caveats, of course.

"At this stage, the best practice is for highly educated users to spot the mistakes and use Generative AI applications as an augmentation to existing labor rather than substitution," they wrote.

Bot Commodity

ChatGPT exploded into the limelight after its public release at the end of November, becoming what's believed to be the fastest growing app in history.

Since it's free, seemingly anyone and everyone has given a shot at shooting the breeze with the bot and others like it. College students have tried to get it to do their homework, while some media companies have even used AI to publish entire articles, with embarrassing results.

Even the biggest tech heavyweights are trying to get on board the generative AI hype train. Microsoft has both dazzled and confounded with a limited release of its new and highly chaotic GPT-powered Bing search engine. Google, meanwhile, remains waiting in the wings with its own upcoming chatbot Bard.

Despite the overwhelming amount of investment and hype surrounding ChatGPT and AI chatbots in general, it's quickly become apparent that while ChatGPT and Bing AI are good at predicting how to string together a cogent sentence, they're not always great at getting the facts straight.

And in the world of banking, where employees frequently handle sensitive information on their clients and may hold the full extent of clients' finances in their hands, you probably don't what a bot that's bad at math and often outright makes up facts getting too involved.

More on ChatGPT: OpenAI CEO Says AI Will Give Medical Advice to People Too Poor to Afford Doctors